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("LOVE IS A MANY SPLENDORED THING" IS ONE OF THE MOST ROMANTIC
MOVIES AND SONGS EVER WRITTEN--STARRIGN WILLIAM HOLDEN AND JENNIFER
JONES IT BROKE RECORDS WHEN IT CAME OUT--BEIGN THE ROMANTIC I AM IT
BROKE MY HEART TO FIND OUT HAN SUYIN MARRIED VERY SOON AFTER HER LOVER'S
DEATH!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stz8-PKdwDs
Han Suyin dies at 95; wrote 'Many-Splendored Thing'
The Eurasian author's commercial success fueled a prolific
career as a writer and unofficial spokeswoman for China during the Cold
War years and beyond.
By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times
November 11, 2012
| t |
Han Suyin defiantly straddled two worlds decades before multiculturalism became fashionable.
"We
must carry ourselves with colossal assurance and say, 'Look at us, the
Eurasians!' " the half-Chinese, half-Belgian physician and author whose
career swept across continents and historic upheavals wrote in "A
Many-Splendored Thing," the 1952 novel that made her an international
celebrity.
Her strongly autobiographical bestseller about war,
cultural identity and love between a half-Chinese physician and a
British journalist in Hong Kong spawned the blockbuster 1955 Jennifer
Jones-William Holden movie "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing." Its
Oscar-winning theme song became a sentimental standard, and a popular
television soap opera based on Han's story followed.
Han, whose
commercial success fueled a prolific career as a writer and unofficial
spokeswoman for China during the Cold War years and beyond, died Nov. 2
of natural causes at her home in Lausanne, Switzerland, said her
granddaughter, Karen L. Shepard. She was 95.
She wrote more than
30 books over 50 years, including the novel "Till Morning Comes" (1982),
a love story set in revolutionary China; and the memoirs "The Crippled
Tree" (1965) and "My House Has Two Doors" (1980).
Passionate and
polemical, her views often drew sharp criticism. She wrote admiring
biographies of Mao Tse-tung and Zhou En-lai that led some critics to
brand her a China apologist. Other detractors called her an opportunist
for her changing views. At one time she supported Nationalist Chinese
leader Chiang Kai-shek against Mao. Later, she endorsed the Cultural
Revolution but switched sides when the movement's cruelties could no
longer be denied.
"I'm a person who changes," she told the New
York Times in 1985. "If tomorrow you prove to me something new, I'll be
quite willing to overturn my ideas because ideas are made to be
overturned."
Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou was born in the Henan
province city of Sinyang on Sept. 12, 1917. She later adopted the first
name Elizabeth.
Her mother was a headstrong Belgian who, according
to "The Crippled Tree," literally kicked her way out of her parents'
house to be with Han's father. A railway engineering student in
Brussels, he returned to China with his bride in 1913, but being a
mixed-race couple brought hardships.
Her mother lost three
children because European doctors could not be bothered with sick
"half-caste" babies. "Eurasian," Han later recalled, was "a dirty word."
Han later mused that her mother's disparagement of China led the
rebellious daughter to favor her Chinese side.
Against her
mother's wishes, she enrolled at Yenching University in Beijing, working
as a typist to pay her fees. She later earned a scholarship to study
medicine at Brussels University.
On her way back to China in 1938
she met Tang Pao-huang, who was an aide-de-camp to Gen. Chiang Kai-shek
and became her first husband.
In Chungking, the provisional
capital for the Nationalist Chinese government during the Sino-Japanese
War, Han learned to write with the encouragement of missionary doctor
Marian Manly. The result was her first book, "Destination Chungking"
(1942), a chronicle of wartime China and her perilous journeys with
Tang. She took the pen name Han Suyin, which she said translated to "a
very ordinary sound."
The book earned a review in the New Yorker,
which called it a "warmhearted, rather naive account" of the young
couple's experiences.
In 1947 Tang died fighting communists in
Manchuria. Han completed her medical education in London and moved with
their adopted daughter, Yungmei, to Hong Kong.
There she met Ian
Morrison, a married British newspaper correspondent. Their unabashedly
passionate romance formed the basis of "A Many-Splendored Thing." Time
magazine said the book "makes uncomfortable reading because it so
willfully, often tastelessly, exposes the deepest private feelings of
its principals." It said the book was more successful describing the
Hong Kong of 1949 and 1950, when the colony teemed with refugees fleeing
from communists on the Chinese mainland.
When Morrison was killed
in 1950 covering the Korean War, Han moved to Malaysia, where she
practiced medicine and met Leon Comber, a British intelligence officer,
whom she married in 1952. They were later divorced. In 1971 she married
her third husband, Vincent Ruthnaswamy, an Indian engineer with whom she
lived in India and Switzerland. He died in 2003.
In addition to her daughter and granddaughter, Han is survived by a sister and three great-grandchildren.
After
earning worldwide acclaim with "A Many-Splendored Thing," Han regularly
traveled to China to lecture. She maintained close ties with former
classmates from Yenching who became early leaders of China's Communist
Party, and met privately with Zhou, the Chinese premier.
Her books
included "China in the Year 2001" (1967), "The Morning Deluge" (1972)
and "Wind in the Tower" (1976), which tackled the history of Mao and the
Cultural Revolution. She also wrote "Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the
Making of Modern China" (1994), which Ian Buruma described in the New
Yorker as "not a biography but an act of worship."
Her
granddaughter said Han often felt misunderstood but never discouraged.
"As a Eurasian, I believe my grandmother saw her life's work as all
about bridging East and West," Shepard said.
"I write as an Asian,
with all the pent-up emotions of my people," Han once said. "What I say
will annoy many people who prefer the more conventional myths brought
back by writers on the Orient. All I can say is that I try to tell the
Truth.…"
